believing himself almost proprietor, built a comfortable house under the walls of the old castle, and in that house was born the writer of these notes. I do not feel myself severed by any disgusts from the country of my youth where I spent my best years, or at least the years of most enjoyment. It was then a wild moor, with some natural beauty, a picturesque den leading from the house to the noble river, wooded with native birch and scrubby oak, with some tall larches and magnificent horse-chestnuts, and even a few immemorial Spanish chestnuts planted by the old Peterboroughs, now all gone. Along that river bank were some of the broadest haughs with which I am acquainted, and some of the best salmon streams, then woods and sheep pastures and a dozen miles of heather hills--up to Cairn-monearn and Kerloach--giving the best grouse-shooting in the country. It is in truth a charming water-side even in the eyes of a critical old man, or of a tourist in search of the picturesque; but for a boy who lived there, shot, and fished there, while all the houses round were the dwellings of cousins and friends, while game was not yet let for hire, it was a place to win that boy's heart, and I loved it very heartily. We were the nearest neighbours on one side of that cluster of residences of the Burnetts and Douglases and Russells which I have tried to describe. We were all very good friends, and thus the Dean and I were early acquainted.

I have said little of the Dean's ancestors, merely named the Burnetts and Bannermans. Indeed I would guard against loading my memoir of the Dean with anything like mere pedigree. I take no interest in his ancestry, except in so far as they may have given a character--so far as he may have inherited his personal qualities from them. I will not dwell then upon Alexander de Burnard, who had his charter from Robert the Bruce of the Deeside lands which his descendants still hold, nor even on the first Lairds of Leys. When the Reformation blazed over Scotland, the Baron of Leys and his kindred favoured and led the party that supported the new faith; but, even in that iconoclastic age, two of them are found protesting against the destruction of religious places at Aberdeen. One, Gilbert Burnett (he was grand-uncle of the Bishop of Sarum), enjoyed considerable reputation abroad for certain philosophical writings. He was Professor of Philosophy, first at Basle and afterwards at Montauban, and a general synod of the French Protestants desired that his works should be printed at the expense of the synod. These Dissertationes Ethicæ were accordingly published at Leyden in 1649; but his death prevented his other writings from being published. Two brothers of the same generation, Thomas and Duncan, settled in England as physicians, and seem to have been men of literary eminence. Pedigrees of both are to be found in the Herald's Visitations of Essex and Norfolk. Duncan, Thomas, and Gilbert, are all noticed by Sir Thomas Middleton among the "Learned Men and Writers of Aberdeen;" and Duncan is noted as a holy, good, and learned man. In the stirring times of the Covenants, Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys, Baronet, though an adherent of the Huntlys, embraced the Covenant from conscientious motives against his political instincts and associations. And ever afterwards we find him firm in the principles of the Covenant, yet advising peaceful and moderate counsels; and when Montrose, after his conversion to the royal cause, passed through Aberdeenshire, harrying the lands of the leading Covenanters, he supped one day at Crathes, excepted and protected Sir Thomas Burnett and his son-in-law, Sir William Forbes of Monymusk, in the general denunciation of the Puritans. We find Sir Thomas repeatedly a commissioner for visiting the University of Aberdeen, and in his later years he endowed three bursaries at King's College, his own alma mater. Jamesone has painted him with a thoughtful and refined, but earnest and manly face. The baronet's brother, James Burnett of Craigmyle, was of the same character. No less earnest and staunch than his brother in his adherence to his principles--he ever figures as a peace-maker and enemy of bloodshed. He is described by the parson of Rothiemay, an unsuspected testimony, as a "gentleman of great wisdom, and one who favoured the King though he dwelt among the Covenanters, and was loved and respected by all." Is it not plain that the temperance and moderation descended in the blood of the Burnetts?

Thomas Burnett of Kemnay, grandson of Craigmyle, is known in a sphere where few Scotsmen had entered. He was a courtier of that remarkable little court of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, where he became the friend of the philosopher Leibnitz, correspondent of the poet Dryden, and his letters are full of curious gossip on the most various subjects--theology, philosophy, literature, including poetry and the small talk of the day. He was greatly employed and trusted by the Electress Sophia. His son George was noted as an agriculturist, and his grandson, Alexander Burnett of Kemnay (by a daughter of Sir Alexander Burnett of Leys), was long British Secretary of embassy at Berlin, and attended Frederick the Great in the campaigns of the Seven Years' War; remaining at the Prussian Court as Chargé d'Affaires after Sir Andrew Mitchell's death.

James, third son of Craigmyle the Covenanter, married a daughter of the family of Irvine of Monboddo, a scion of the house of Drum, and having so acquired that barony, he transmitted it to his descendants, of whom the most famous was his great-grandson, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, a Judge of the Court of Session, an eminent lawyer, and a man of rare accomplishments, with some whimsical peculiarities. In a treatise on the origin and progress of language, he was the first seriously to assert the descent of mankind from the monkey, and that the human race were originally furnished with tails! That and a hundred other whimsies were mixed up with a great deal of learning then very rare, and with a philosophy that dealt in free and daring speculation, of which the world was not yet worthy.

The first baronet of Leys, besides his brother James of Craigmyle, had yet another brother, Robert Burnett of Crimond, an eminent advocate, very learned, and of high moral and religious principle. Though his wife was a sister of Johnstone of Warriston, he himself, unlike his two brothers, was an opponent of the Covenant, for which he went into exile until the Restoration, when he was made a Judge of the Court of Session as Lord Crimond. He had three sons by the Warriston lady. His eldest, Sir Thomas Burnett, was physician to royalty from Charles II to Queen Anne. The third was Gilbert, Bishop of Salisbury, of whom it is not my intention to give any detailed account. His brilliant talents and great influence made him many friends, and even more enemies. History is beginning to do justice to his character without concealing his weaknesses. He seems to have been more honest than was the fashion in his time.

Such is the little gathering of family history, for the accuracy of which I am chiefly indebted to my kind friend the Lord Lyon--himself a Burnett. Perhaps I should apologise for saying even the little I have said of the Dean's pedigree; but while I press into my service the country of his birth and breeding, and the local peculiarities amongst which his life was spent, as possibly having some influence on his character, I could not resist the wish to show another element, drawn from his ancestry, that went to the forming of that character. Was not our Dean a worthy representative of Puritan leaders who refused to go into the violence of the Covenant--of the Bishop of unreproached life, who read the Thirty-nine Articles with an unconcealed desire to include conscientious Dissenters--of many peaceful gentlemen on the banks of the Dee, who mixed a happy playful humour with a catholic reverence for that Christianity which he could recognise in other sects, though preferring his own?

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